Until We Go Down

~Night~

Smoke.

Esme's bony fingers gripped the tip of her cigarette, her thin arms perched on the railing with her hand resting lazily in the suspended air. She knew the harms of smoking, but she was too deep in her habit to care.

She took her final puff, allowing her body to feel a final moment of relief, before exhaling the smoke out of her system. The fall breeze blew the smoke into the rising sun, and Esme felt at peace as she headed back inside her apartment to shower the scent off her hair and skin.

Esme cracked a small window open in her bathroom, leaving a sliver ajar to reveal herself to the world. She wasn't sure how long she stood motionless in her bathtub, but she silently thanked herself for cracking the window. If she didn't, then she most likely would've suffocated in the hot steam.

She wrapped her towel around herself and stepped out of the shower once the water turned cold. Her wet feet smeared across the hardwood floor across her small apartment all the way to her bedroom, where she sat unwrapped on her bed.

Esme contemplated whether or not she should call in sick, and immediately decided against it. She needed to pay for rent, she wasn't going to end up homeless again.

The thought made a shiver run down her spine, through her bones and her chemical makeup. All those cold nights of sleeping on a park bench, under large pieces of other people's trash, desperately fogging her hands together to keep warm.

The humiliation of walking up and down the street pavement with an old tin can, begging strangers for money, food, clothing, anything to survive.

No. Anything but that life.

If she was going to kill people for a living, guilty or innocent, then so be it. The reality of her world was unkind to those who needed it most, replacing the considered bad and the ugly with masked robots to lead.

Later that morning, Esme greeted the bus driver with a simple head nod before finding a seat at the back of the vehicle. A small black backpack was strapped onto her shoulders, carrying only the essentials: Her morning coffee, gum, her cell phone, wallet, a lighter, a stack of paperwork concerning this week's kill list, and a pack of cigarettes.

She sat alone, the only other person on the bus was the driver. Esme closed her eyes in the comfortable silence, the only noise she could hear was the hum of the engine and the faint sound of the bus exhaust releasing into the polluted Detroit air.

Unrealizing she had dozed off, Esme opened her eyes to four more passengers scattered around the bus. She violently jerked her head out the window, checking her surroundings just to make sure she didn't miss her stop. Fortunately, she could still see her apartment building right before the bus turned the corner and the only thing left visible was the shadow of her home as the bus drove further away.

It was a nice day outside, not too hot, not too cold. The sun was masked by a thin blanket of stratus clouds with a few lint balls of cumulus clouds scattered across the sky.

Esme caught a glimpse of her reflection in the window. She never paid attention to her looks, she was always bored with her appearance. Her chestnut colored wavy locks of hair usually tangled past her shoulders and down her back, but she always wore it in a tight ponytail for work. Her gray eyes almost never showed any expression, always shady, jaded, bored. She had a long thin neck that supported her heart-shaped face, with thick messy eyebrows. Her natural skin was a light tan, coming from both a mixed Hispanic and Caucasian descent.

She blankly rolled her eyes at her reflection. She only reminded herself of a younger version of her mother. She couldn't bring herself to think about her, or anybody of her past.